Okay. Chalk me up as intimidated.
“Keep to the trail,” she said. “Don’t touch anything, don’t step on anything, don’t brush against anything. Understand?”
“Yes. Everything here wants me dead.”
Which was too bad. To someone who’d grown up with Great St. Caspian’s half-throttled flora and fauna, the rain forest was a heady gush of abundance. Take the insect life, for instance. In Bonaventure, bloodflies were puny things, traveling in fast-moving swarms that dodged and weaved like drunken dockworkers. Here in Mummichog, I was buzzed by a single fly near as big as my thumb— no need for safety in numbers, this guy could take care of himself. Slow and bullish, able to withstand a head-on swat: the supertanker of bloodflies, with a monstrous hemoglobin-carrying capacity. Thank God this beastie had one thing in common with his baby brothers up north; evolution had only taught him to suck on native Demoth lifeforms, not humans. Perhaps he gave me a sniff as he flew by…but I didn’t smell like his natural prey, so he continued bumbling past.
One insect down, billions to go.
Ants the size of a baby’s foot…moths bigger than my hand…beetles so huge you could use their carapaces as bread plates…not that these were genuine terrestrial insects, of course. Eight legs, no antennae, oddly hinged mandibles; but the names humans hung on most Demoth wildlife were Earth names because those were the names we had. These creatures scuttled like beetles; they had chitinous shells like beetles; they filled the same ecological niches as beetles; they might as well be called beetles, even if they were giant alien groundthumpers.
“Stop gawking,” Festina ordered. “We have to find Cuttack.”
“I asked the Peacock to take us to the mine,” I told her. “It must be close by.”
“Says you,” she muttered. “Your pet Peacock might have dumped us a thousand klicks from Mummichog because the place was too damned dangerous.”
“You’re just jealous you don’t have an invisible friend.”
I looked at the ground again; the dirt held a string of clear bootprints, made when the soil was muddy and preserved when everything dried. The tracks couldn’t be Voostor’s—too deep for a lightweight Oolom. If my mother never came back here, this had to be Maya’s trail. I asked, “Is this the sort of jungle where it rains every afternoon?”
“How should I know?” Festina said. “This is your planet.”
“Yes, but you’re the jungle queen.”
She stuck out her tongue at me. I didn’t know admirals did that.
“Let’s go this way,” I said, pointing back up the trail: the direction the boots had come from. If rain fell here every afternoon, the tracks must have been made late yesterday—Maya heading back to the house after knocking off work. Follow them backward and we’d find where Maya spent her day.
The bootprints kept to the game trail for a few dozen paces, then veered off on a narrower track. Still easy to follow—Maya hadn’t tried to disguise her path. We wove our way over dirt leached light as sand, while bloodflies buzzed round our ears and wondered if they should bite us just for jollies. Past creeping vines and epiphytes floating on balloon sacs…crimson-strip fungi laid out like bacon on dead tree trunks…even a snake-belly or two…till we nearly walked past an overgrown hole in the forest floor.
If not for the bootprints, we would have missed the mine. Part of the entrance had been cleared with a machete, then covered again with prickly-leaved branches from nearby shrubs. Festina was still wearing her good-for-the-tundra gloves (“And I’ll wear them till we get someplace that I call warm!”) so she had no trouble pulling branches away from the hole, never mind the bristles and pricks.
Leaving a tunnel that led downward.
Just inside the tunnel sat a plastic box holding five torch-wands.
“Convenient,” Festina said, picking one up.
“Easier to stash a box here,” I replied, “than bringing them up from the house all the time. Besides, Maya was pretending to be a biologist. Mother or Voostor might have wondered why she needed torch-wands to poke about beamy bright jungle.”
“Mmm.” Festina looked into the hole. “Down now? Or wait for Maya and ambush her?”
I looked at the hole myself, then shook my head. “It’d be nice to know what’s in there, but Maya’s more important. Stop her before she does something we’ll regret.”
“Agreed.” Festina checked the batteries on her pistol.
“Before you start shooting,” I said, “remember she still might be innocent. Maya could have had her little dance with Chappalar, then headed down here the same night. Sounds like no one in Mummichog listens to the news, so she never heard tell of the murders. Doesn’t know her sweetie’s dead, doesn’t know the cops want to question her….”
Festina just looked at me.
“Right,” I said. “Stun the bitch’s tits off and apologize later.”
We made the ambush simple: Festina down the tunnel, waiting with pistol in hand. I borrowed her gloves and covered back the hole with branches, so Maya wouldn’t know she’d had visitors. Then I moved off a ways, hunkering down behind a fallen log till our target arrived.
(Not touching the log. I’d heard about insects who made nests in such places, and got swarming mad if you gave their homes a knock.)
So we waited. For Maya to scuttle down the path, racing toward the mine and whatever she’d stashed below. Festina would stun her the second Maya started clearing branches from the hole, and that would be that. In due time, flocks of people would arrive from Pistolet: the med team for Oh-God, police for Maya, plus a rabble-pack of robot experts, archaeologists, forensics specialists and who-all else might get sent to investigate Maya’s home away from home.
With luck, they’d let Tic and me look over their shoulders for a while…till more senior proctors arrived to shove us aside again.
In the distance, I heard shouting. Tic and Voostor yelling. At Maya? Why? If they’d caught up with her after she bolted from the house, they wouldn’t holler; Tic would sweep silently out of the sky and deck her with a sock to the jaw. I’d never seen him fight, but he was a master proctor. Zenned-out too. That put him in the same league as those little old gents in fic-chips, the kind who look beatific as soap till they whonk you with a heelkick to the head. If Tic could reach Maya, he could take her down.
So why all the whooping and bellowing?
Suddenly, Tic’s voice got joined by shrill animal howling: a noise I recognized from VR sims of jungle life. The danger call of siren-lizards. They were only the size of squirrels, teeny pseudo-reptiles who clambered through the canopy eating fruit and seedpods…but they had eyes keen as hawks’, and a resonating collar around their throats that made their shrieks trumpet-loud. Naturalists called them “the Klaxons of the rain forest”—little noise-boxes that screamed blue murder if something scared them.
They were scared now: dozens of them, high and off to my right. Then another troop of lizards took up the cry, this one a fair bit closer. Were they just echoing the shrieks of the first bunch—an instinct to squeal when they heard other sirens howling? Or had they actually seen something, something coming my way?
More sirens took up the wail. Closer. I couldn’t hear anything else over the racket. What was up there? What?
Something they could see from the treetops. Something flying. A skimmer?
Christ, of course Maya had a skimmer. We’d known from the start she didn’t leave Bonaventure by transport sleeve. She had her own vehicle, and now she was bugging out in it.
World-soul, I thought, track it, track it! But even before I finished the mental shout, my mind filled with the world-soul’s response: ground radar couldn’t get a fix.
Lord weeping Jesus, did everyone on this planet have stealth equipment?
Something ripped through the canopy of leaves straight overhead. I had a quick glimpse of a skimmer’s underbelly, its bay doors open; then something big and black and blimp-shaped started to fall, crashing down through the trees.
“You’re kidding,” I said in disbelief. A bomb? She had a bomb in the skimmer? And she was dropping it on me. No, not me, she didn’t know I was here; she was bombing the mine entrance, to close it off, seal it up.
Which would still blow me to smithereens.
“Festina!” I shouted. “Incoming bomb! Head down the mine, deep as you can go.”
The blimp-shaped cylinder continued to fall—jerkily, slowly, catching on tree limbs, stopping for a moment before its weight broke the branch or it rolled off sideways, then falling a few more meters till it hit the next snag.
How much bouncing could it stand before it blew up?
I tore my gaze from the blundering bomb, and of course the Peacock was rippling in front of me, tail snaking far out of the jungle. “No,” I snapped. “Down the mine! I want to go down the mine.”
Festina was there. If I went in too, the Peacock and I could save her. If I let the Peacock chute me out of the forest, it might not volunteer to bring me back.
Festina would be trapped in the dark. Like my father.
I could feel reluctance spilling from the Peacock like a physical force; but its tail flicked, swept, and jammed itself through the shrubbery covering the tunnel entrance. Before it changed its mind, I threw myself into its mouth.
Vomited into blackness. I scraped my arm as I landed on the unseen stone floor, but it only did minor damage—this tunnel had a thicker carpet of dirt, fungus and animal crap than the one in Great St. Caspian. The jungle had more wildlife than the tundra…more dung and droppings for me to splash into.
Joy.
Then light flamed viciously far to my right, followed by a distant roar and rumble. That would be the bomb, blowing the bejeezus out of the mine entrance. Collapsing who knows how much dirt and stone to close the tunnel. Probably setting fire to the forest too, giving the siren-lizards something to really howl about.
The ground beneath me shook for ten seconds, trembling as more and more debris fell into the tunnel mouth. Not just dirt but trees toppled by the blast. I could imagine their leaves burning, while birds squawked and lizards shrieked and insects tore away from the flames…
But I couldn’t hear any of it. Not with a massive plug of jungle floor sealing off the mine. I couldn’t even hear the shaking; I could only feel it through the stone under my body.
After a few seconds, the quaking stopped. Then a heavy silence set in, as if I’d gone deaf. No—I could hear my own breathing. But no one else’s.
“Festina?” I called. She must have had time enough to run for safety. To bolt down the tunnel, out of the blast radius, beyond the cave-in.
Unless she hadn’t heard my warning. Or she tried to run the other way, out into the open rather than be trapped underground.
Out into the explosion.
“Festina-girl!” I called again. “Are you there?”
A torch-wand sprang on in the darkness. “Okay,” Festina growled, her uniform smeared with dirt, “when I said the jungle was dangerous, I meant snakes. I meant jaguars. I meant army ants, and piranha, and bushes with sharp spiky thorns. I did not mean goddamned motherfucking high-explosive bombs.”
Pause.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah sure.” She brushed mud off her shirtsleeve. “I’m an Explorer. I’ve lived through real explosions.”
I could have called the Peacock to get us out. If it had managed to thread its way through the Rustico mine cave-in, it could do the same here. But I wasn’t leaving yet. Not till I saw what Maya had found down here…something she wanted to keep secret so badly, she had a bomb ready in case she needed to obliterate it.
World-soul, I thought, are you receiving?
Immediate acknowledgment.
Good. I was worried we were too far underground for link-seed radio transmission. Tell Master Tic that Festina and I are safe. Pass it on to my family too. We can get out of this tunnel anytime, but first we’re going to see what’s down here.
Acknowledgment. And underneath the bland mechanical okey-dokey, a twitch of something else. Something with a squirt of adrenaline. Fear? Or was it excitement?
Festina had been watching me. “So?” she asked.
“So we’re here,” I said. “And if we tube out now, it may take a long time for anyone else to dig down here. I think we should see what Maya wanted to hide.”
“There might be androids,” Festina muttered.
“We’ll tell them we’re allergic, same as last time.”
“That trick only works if we see the robots first.”
“Come on,” I said. “Aren’t you curious what’s down here?”
“Of course I am,” she snapped, “and damn it, I shouldn’t be. Explorers are supposed to purge out every grain of curiosity they find lurking in their souls.”
“So what? You aren’t an Explorer anymore.”
Her eyes squinched down with anger. “Faye…till the day I die, I will always be an Explorer.”
“No. That part’s over now. You’re someone else.” She started to interrupt, but I plowed on. “No. No. You’ve got to stop telling yourself you’re that old person, because you aren’t anymore. You don’t have to dig that hole deeper; you can just walk away.”
She glared at me for another few seconds with those blazing green eyes; then she dropped her gaze to the dirty floor. “I could say the same to you,” she murmured.
“You wouldn’t be the first,” I told her. “Blessed near everyone in my family rags on me about it. High time I got to rag on someone myself.” I reached out, took her by the shoulders, stared her straight in the eye. “Festina Ramos: you aren’t an Explorer anymore. That’s behind you. It’s still part of you, of course it is, but you’ve got other parts now. Here-and-now parts. And telling yourself, I’m still a disposable nothing, is a witless way of behaving, especially when you have important things to do. Live in the real, dear one. Got it?”
The edges of her mouth twitched up. “Does talk like this really work on you?”
“Depends what you mean ‘work.’ “
When my fine sweet Lynn took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and gave me a pep talk, calling me “dear one” and what-all, I sometimes got worked up right enough…though not with lofty thoughts about my personal potential. More like longing thoughts, wishing there was some way past all my years of playing the self-sufficient loner.
Same thing here. Eye to eye with Festina, just the two of us in the quiet black of the tunnel. Jungle-warm. Jungle-moist.
She eased herself away from me, holding eye contact a second more before she let her gaze slip shy to the floor. “Okay,” she said, “it probably won’t hurt to look around a bit. If we’re careful. Better than just standing here in the dark.”
I looked at her a heartbeat longer, then turned away. Two seconds later, I felt her hand warm on my bare arm. “Faye…”
I turned back, my heart flying. But whatever she’d been going to say, ex-Explorer Lieutenant Admiral Ramos suddenly lost her nerve. Instead she just mumbled, “You carry the torch-wand,” and pushed it toward me.
Passing the torch, for God’s sake. Handing me the decision.
What futtering cowards, the pair of us. I knew I should just swoop her up in my arms, then and there. Both of us waited to see if I’d do it.
“Christ,” I finally said, “we have work to do.”
I shoved the torch-wand roughly back into her hands.
“Right,” she said. Finally letting go of the breath she’d been holding. “Right. We’d better get moving.” She gave me a side glance. “Keep ourselves busy.” She looked away again. “See what there is to find.”
For another second, she just stared at the torch in her hands. Then she lifted it high and started leading the way down.
A hundred meters on, we came to the first rockfall. Part of the ceiling had given way, dumping a load of stone and soil. The wreckage had been shoved off to the sides of the tunnel, leaving a clear trail down the middle.
I stopped long enough to nudge a chunk of debris with my foot. Any girl brought up in Sallysweet River develops a canny feel for stone. Fleck by fleck, this looked like granite…but overall its texture was too regular, with none of the wrinkles you find in honest-to-igneous rock. My gut said it was artificial—poured like concrete, then flash-hardened.
Strange, when you thought about it. If this was a mine, why line the walls with synthetic rock? Shouldn’t mines have rock of their own? Then again, the bedrock here must lie a lot deeper than in the Great St. Caspian shield…so this part of the tunnel might need to be shored up with extra support till it got down into solid stone.
Could be. But it sounded a lot like rationalization.
There were more rockfalls as we went along, some several meters long, some only a litter of stones. Each time, a path had been cleared so we could pass through prance-easy: the work of Maya and Iranu, or more likely, their robots. Here and there, they’d propped support poles from floor to ceiling to shore up parts of the roof: places where the pseudo-granite showed thready black cracks of strain.
I’d never seen any such cracking in the abandoned mines around Sallysweet River. Then again, Great St. Caspian had bugger-all in the way of earthquakes. I didn’t know much about Mummichog specifically, but the whole Argentia continent had a reputation for being seismically active, so no surprise this particular mine suffered the occasional crumble.
At length we came to an area where the slant of the tunnel flattened to a wide room, much like the one up north where we found Kowkow Iranu. Rusty lumps sat scattered about the floor like dog turds—just left lying, though you’d think archaeologists would scrape up the stuff as valuable artifacts. At the very least, Maya should have chalked measurement lines on the floor. But no. Nary a sign she’d paid attention to this junk at all.
“Look there,” Festina said in a low voice, pointing the torch-wand toward the far end of the room.
Another tunnel collapse—this one taking out part of the wall. Beyond was another room, dark, too far for the torch-light to reach. I couldn’t help noticing there was no visible door between that room and ours. If the wall hadn’t fallen in, there’d be no way through.
The League of Peoples Page 91